Search This Blog

The world of gaming peripherals is odd-everyone bemoans the gamer tax’, whereby manufacturers seem to charge an extra 20% for gaming gear, and yet they are increasingly turning to professional gamers to help design that hardware. We may be doing Emil ‘HeatoN’ Christensen (dubbed the best Counter-Strike player in the world) and Abdisamad ‘SpawN’ Mohammed (12-times worldwide Counter-Strike champion) a disservice but we doubt if they have many qualifications in display device design. Yet these two CS players have been roped into help BenQ to design its first gaming- specific screen, the XL2410T

The end result is a feature list that reads a little like the disastrous car that Homer designed for his brother Herb. For example, there’s a DisplayMode feature that replicates the screen size of smaller screen pixel for pixel-the screen can display anything from 71in, 5:4 upwards, complete with black borders. The reasoning behind this is that professional gaming tournament players use different screens and witching from a 24in 1920x1080 screen to a much smaller one could throw your game. SpawN and HeatoN wanted to practice at home on a screen that was the same size as that used in a forthcoming tournament to familiarize themselves with it, but this feature will be genuinely useful for few other people.

The XL2410T is bundled with a Zowie EC1 mouse and a Zowie Swift plastic-topped mousepad. The mouse is reminiscent of a Razer DeatAdder crossed with Microsoft IntelliMouse and is designed by HeatoN. It works well with the plastic pad (designed by SpawN), although the pad has a rough surface that might annoy some people. More to the point, we suspect that if you’re looking to buy a gaming screen, you probably own a favorite mouse and pad.

Of more use to kind of twitchy gaming that undoubtedly won SpawN and HeatoN their numerous accolades is the 120Hz refresh rate. While this is also compatible with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision, of more use is the higher refresh rate that usually provide crisper images and less blur. As the panel is based on TN technology, it has a response time of 2ms, so objects should look crisp and sharp, even if they are moving fast. If your gaming skills are honed to flick to pixel-wide slivers of heads peeking around corners, these two technologies should be useful.

We’re not convinced that the two pro-gamers had anything to do with the housing of the BenQ, as its utilitarian in appearance. Going by Homer’s bubbler car, may be that’s a good thing. While the height adjustment requires wrestling with a catch, there’s 130mm of play and you can also rotate pivot and swivel the screen. On the underside are HDMI, D-Sub and DVI inputs, but the headphone mini-jack on the side is largely useless- there’s no microphone connection for a gaming headset. And you have to transfer audio to the screen via HDMI in the first place.

By default, the XL2410T has a very blue color cast making the images look positively hypothermic. We reduced this by lowering the blue color channel from 100 to 89 via the OSD menu, but the row of OSD buttons made the job trickier than necessary. We also turned off the ridiculous 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio (the static 1,000:1 ratio is plenty). The screen has a few image modes, from FPS to Movie to Eco, but they all look horrible – FPS mode returns the screen to its excessively wintry color balance, while Eco dims the 300cd/m² backlight to an unusable low level in order to save just 12W of power consumption.

While most TN screens struggles to discern dark grays from black the XL2410T was less able at this than most screens, meaning that shadows looked flat lifeless in games and videos; the Serenity HD trailer didn’t look as rich as usual, for example. Oddly the XL2410T gave a yellow tint to the explosions and skin tones too, a downside that wasn’t balanced out by the optical illusions that poor contrast in dark tones gives images a more solid feel. However, the XL2410T lacked the sparkle of IPS-based screens such as the $289.99 ViewSonic VP2365wb – the images looked fine, but nothing more. At least 120Hz refresh rate and 2ms response time helped moving objects on the XL2410T to remain solid and crisp.

Unboxing And Review

Conclusion

BenQ might call the XL2410T its first gaming-specific screen, but its design is even more focused then this- it’s the first screen made for professional-level gamers and primarily FPS pro-gamers. However, while the 120Hz refresh rate and 2ms response time help to keep even fast-moving images sharp, the XL2410T has merely adequate image quality and handles dark shades poorly. The ViewSonic VP2365wb has richer image quality an adjustable stands and is more than $110 cheaper than the XL2410T